New York Times on the Web Forums Science

Missile Defense

Technology has always found its greatest consumer in a nation's war and defense efforts. Since the last attempts at a "Star Wars" defense system, has technology changed considerably enough to make the latest Missile Defense initiatives more successful? Can such an application of science be successful? Is a militarized space inevitable, necessary or impossible?

Read Debates, a new Web-only feature culled from Readers' Opinions, published every Thursday.

mazza9 - 08:04pm Aug 29, 2002 EST (# 4015 of 4019)
"Quae cum ita sunt" Caesar's Gallic Commentaries

Missile Defense will work. The tests and progress are as can be expected whenever a new system is being developed.

On the dawn of the 100th anniversary of flight we can look at the progress of flight and all its possibilities and realize that whatever we can dream we can fashion. Orville lived to see the Wright flyer evolve into the Boeing Stratocruiser. If in 1903 someone had said that the willow and canvass contraption would evolve into a transoceanic passenger plane which would carry a 100 passengers from NY to Paris what do you think he would say? No it's not possible! Yes with powerplant and materials development anything is possible. The latter answer is informed. The former is narrow and uninformed.

Missile Defense will work.

rshow55 - 09:01pm Aug 29, 2002 EST (# 4016 of 4019)
Can we do a better job of finding truth? YES. Click "rshow55" for some things Lchic and I have done and worked for on this thread.

There are plenty of laws of physics that haven't changed since Wright's time -- and they constrain what can actually be done. The people in airplane design have had a good while since the Boeing 707 was the first commercially successful near-sonic jet airplane. There's been plenty of progress since - with plenty of work from the best mechanical engineers the world could provide. Steve Kline, in fluids, may have been the best. The JSME thought he was the best theoretical and experimental fluid mechanician of the 20th century. http://www.wisc.edu/rshowalt/klinerec . There have been many good people in the fields connected to airplane design since the 707 flew.

But still, commercial stuff flys at subsonic speeds for basic reasons.

Clarence L. "Kelly" Johnson, Edwin Teller - and a whole bunch of other technically competent people have known that for a LONG time. Competent, honest technical people still do.

Fix an error in the basic logic of radio wave ranging - to get x, y, z resolution in the 10th of meters, fast -- use math that I set out, as I was instructed in the moderately encripted http://www.wisc.edu/rshowalt/pap2 - - - and use actuators and theory well understood 15 years before I made Eagle Scout -- a long time ago - - and air-air and ground-air missiles - that have been anamolously slow and ineffective since the 1950's, because of some problems in math - will change some balances permanently.

f = ma is a fact (and perfect for what it does - - with Einstein's correction, it seems to be perfect within any measurement that can be done.)

Facts of nature, once you know them - are hopeful things.

They tell you what you can hope to do -- and that's useful. And what you can't do - - which is also useful.

I have a PE ticket, and by now, the Bush administration has something close to a million dollars of staff work in gisterme's responses. If they had any basic stuff to dispute me with -- I'd have been disputed. By somebody with some credentials and some basic technical competence -- things that, in engineering, Mazza lacks according to what he's said here and told me.

Missile Defense is a boondoggle - and has been going wrong for so long that the people involved are tied into something near enough to fraud to make no difference.

People in the Republican party campaigning in favor of MD should know that -- or care enough, after Enron - to check that.

Hit rshow55 above for more information. I'm easy to contact.

mazza9 - 09:57pm Aug 29, 2002 EST (# 4017 of 4019)
"Quae cum ita sunt" Caesar's Gallic Commentaries

Missile Defense is not a boondoggle. That's a fact just like F=MA. ENRON is besides the point unless you wish to discuss Rubin's involvement and the attendant corruption of the Democratic Administration which supported ENRON's India powerplant which lost the US taxpayers hundreds of millions of tax dollars.

Every dollars spent for defense is a dollar well spent if peace is maintained and aggressors deterred. The SDI accomplished that and eventually bankrupted the Soviet Union. What price peace? Going to bed without the Sword of Damocles hanging over our children's head is a price worth paying.

(2 following messages)

New York Times on the Web Forums Science Missile Defense